What if everything you had ever believed, everything you’d ever known was a lie?

I found out some things recently that for a week or so coloured my view of certain person. What those things are and who that person is, I can’t reveal, because it would break a trust that I do not want to lose. But it hurt. It put me in a position of wondering how valid certain things I hold as truth are and what that means in the grand scheme of how I feel about things. It also confirmed a gut feeling that had been nagging at me for a while.

But then I sat and broke it down. My experiences, my truth, are no different than they were before. The things that have happened have happened and they are there and real and true. The reality of it is still there. The opinions of that person are still valid and the way I feel about them is still valid. It’s the actions of another person that brought them into question and that person is neither here nor there to me, although I do find it amusing that I see them in varying shades of grey leaning towards black rather than with complete indifference now.

Someone once asked me “What if everything you had ever believed, everything you’d ever known was a lie?” It’s a common enough question and I honestly can’t remember my answer at the time. But my answer to it now is this:

If you told me today that my truth, what I consider to be true was not true, it still would be. My feelings are still true, my experiences are still true and valid. When I finally saw the person I call my sperm donor for the man he truly is, I was crushed. But that doesn’t lessen the experience and truth of my first eight years of life. I may have been too young to see the whole picture, but those years are very much real and very much valid. It’s my perspective that’s changed. It doesn’t mean my life and my beliefs were a lie. Here’s the thing, you cannot determine an experience as a lie in the same way you can the opposite of a factual truth, because an experience is not always factual, not always logical, and so, the scrutiny of factually based evidence falls apart when trying to use it to measure the truth of experience.

So the things I know now that I didn’t know before about a particular person have shifted the balance slightly, but the truth of my experiences still remains. I still feel the way I did about them, but I just have another piece of the puzzle and I’m trying to fit that into the correct place as it forms part of the bigger picture.